Old Montana Prison

When Montana was still a territory, Congress paid for a prison at Deer Lodge, and convicts laid its first stones in 1870. The first inmate arrived on July 2, 1871. After statehood the prison was run for three decades by Warden Frank Conley, who put inmates to work building the sandstone walls, a new cellhouse finished in 1912, and hundreds of miles of state roads. In 1908 an escape attempt left Deputy Warden John Robinson dead and Conley badly wounded; the two inmates responsible, George Rock and William Hayes, were hanged inside the walls – the only executions ever carried out there.

The prison’s defining night came on April 16, 1959. Inmates led by Jerry Myles and Lee Smart seized rifles from the catwalks, killed Deputy Warden Ted Rothe and held Warden Floyd Powell and other staff hostage for about 36 hours. On April 18 the National Guard stormed the cellhouse after firing a bazooka at the northwest tower, where the ringleaders had retreated; Myles and Smart were found dead there in a murder–suicide, and the hostages came out alive. The scar of that shell is still visible on the tower.

Overcrowded and worn out, the old prison closed when its last inmates were moved to a new facility west of town on September 5, 1979. It had been listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1976, and the Powell County Museum and Arts Foundation reopened it as a museum in 1980, alongside an auto museum and other collections on the same campus.

The ghost stories grew up with the museum. Guides, volunteers and overnight visitors describe footsteps on empty tiers, voices, the feeling of being touched, and shadows crossing the cellblocks – especially in the maximum-security block, the solitary cells known as “the Hole,” and the riot tower. Some stories attach to Paul “Turkey Pete” Eitner, a lifer who tended the prison’s turkeys, came to believe he ran the prison from Cell 1, and died in 1967 after nearly half a century inside. Nothing in the record supports the stories beyond the experiences people report, but they have made the prison Montana’s best-known haunted site.

Footsteps and voices in empty cellblocks, the sensation of being touched or watched, sudden cold, shadow figures, and responses to knocking or ghost-hunting gadgets, mostly reported by guides and paying ghost-tour guests.

The 1912 cellhouse and its upper tiers, maximum security, the solitary “Hole,” the northwest “Death Tower” where the 1959 riot ended, the Clark Theatre (which displays the traveling gallows) and the administration building; mostly during after-dark tours.

The Powell County Museum and Arts Foundation runs seasonal ghost tours, after-hours tours and October “Terror in the Cellhouse” events, and outside groups such as Ghost Hunts USA hold overnight investigations. The 1959 riot inspired the 2004 book Jerry’s Riot by Kevin S. Giles, and the prison features in Ellen Baumler’s Montana ghost books.